Scientific Advisory Board

Timothy R. Donahue, MD
Assistant Professor of Surgery,
and Molecular and Medical Pharmacology

Center for Pancreatic Diseases
Institute for Molecular
Medicine (IMED)
Jonsson Comprehensive
Cancer Center

UCLA School of Medicine

Timothy Donahue, M.D. joined the UCLA Center for Pancreatic Diseases in July of 2009. He is an Assistant Professor of Surgery in the Division of General Surgery, Department of Surgery at UCLA. Dr. Donahue received his M.D. from the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern in 2002 and completed his residency in General Surgery at UCLA in June, 2009 prior to being recruited to the faculty. From 2004 – 2006, Dr. Donahue took time from his clinical training to complete a Postdoctoral Surgical Oncology Research Fellowship at UCLA under the mentorship of Dr. James S. Economou. His research then was focused on adoptive immunotherapy for melanoma. Dr. Donahue’s Lab is focused on identifying the genetic and molecular changes that are responsible for the development and progression of pancreatic cancer with an overall goal of identifying novel markers of earlier disease and targets for individualized treatment. His research program is supported by a Seed Grant from the Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research.

Michael Donovan, M.D., Ph.D.
Chief Medical Officer
Exosome Diagnostics

Dr. Donovan is board certified in anatomic and clinical pathology. He received his medical degree from the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and his Ph.D. in cell and developmental biology from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ. Dr. Donovan completed his residency at the New York Hospital where he also served as Chief Resident of Autopsy Pathology. Dr. Donovan completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School and a one-year Pediatric Pathology Fellowship at Children’s Hospital, Boston. Prior to joining Aureon, Dr. Donovan held positions as Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Senior Director of Molecular Pathology at Millennium Pharmaceuticals, and Senior Vice President at Incyte Genomics.

Edward B. Garon, M.D.
Assistant Clinical Professor
Director – Medical Oncology
Program in Thoracic Malignancies

David Geffen School of
Medicine at UCLA
Translational Oncology
Research Laboratory

Dr. Garon received his MD degree from the Washington University School of Medicine in 1999, and his internal medicine training at the University of Chicago. He trained in Medical Oncology at UCLA, and joined the UCLA faculty in 2006. In 2008 he was appointed as an Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA in the Department of Medicine, Division of Hematology/ Oncology. Dr. Garon has been awarded a UCLA Lung SPORE Career Development Award in 2007, a Hirshberg Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research award in 2007, the Tower Cancer Research Foundation Career Development Award in 2008, and a Lincy Foundation Grant in 2008. His interests are in gastrointestinal, pancreatic and lung oncology.

Nancy Stagliano, Ph.D.
Chief Executive Officer
iPierian Inc.

Nancy Stagliano, Ph.D. joined iPierian as Chief Executive Officer in September 2011 with an accomplished career as a biotech leader spanning all aspects of the industry, from discovery research and strategy to global medical affairs and corporate communications. Prior to joining iPierian, Dr. Stagliano was CEO of CytomX Therapeutics, a company where she was co-founder and a lead inventor on the patents for CytomX’s Probody platform. In earlier roles with CytomX, she served as the COO of CytomX LLC, which launched CytomX Therapeutics as well as Cynvenio Biosystems. Before moving to California, Nancy joined the Cambridge, Massachusetts, biotechnology industry in the late 1990s, where she had an eight-year tenure at Millennium Pharmaceuticals and consulted to several local startups. Dr. Stagliano received her BS in Electrical Engineering and her MS in Biomedical Engineering, both from Drexel University in Philadelphia. She obtained her PhD in Neuroscience from the University of Miami, followed by three years as an independently-funded research fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where she studied mechanisms of brain injury after stroke.

Adel Tabchy, M.D.
Research Medical Director of Breastlink Medical Group, Inc.

Along with undergraduate and medical degrees from the American University of Beirut in Lebanon, Dr. Tabchy holds a master’s degree in mechanical engineering/bioengineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He completed postdoctoral research fellowships at MIT and a residency in internal medicine at Boston University Medical Center before arriving at MD Anderson for a medical oncology fellowship in 2007. Now at work in the Department of Systems Biology and the Robert J. Kleberg, Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Center for Molecular Markers, he is mentored by Systems Biology Chair Gordon B. Mills, M.D., Ph.D.

Dr. Tabchy is co-principal investigator on four novel projects with potential applications in personalized cancer therapies: 1) exploration of molecular lesions in 200 breast tumors via next-generation sequencing; 2) remote tumor sampling: a peripheral blood test as an alternative to tumor biopsy to detect mutations in tumor DNA; 3) complete characterization of molecular abnormalities in blood and tumors of 10 cancer patients; and 4) comparison of DNA in the blood of cancer patients vs. healthy individuals.

The breast cancer next-generation sequencing project —a first-of-its-kind study—aims to develop a comprehensive molecular portrait of the genome of breast tumors, with special focus on the HER pathway. Overexpressed in about 20 percent of breast cancers, the HER2 protein is linked to increased disease recurrence and poor prognosis. This study will reveal biomarkers of treatment response and resistance.

Dr. Tabchy’s other investigations are harnessing new technologies for detecting DNA shed from tumor cells into the bloodstream. Ultimately, they may help guide therapy selection, monitor response/resistance to therapy, and enable earlier diagnoses.

James Waisman, M.D.
Vice President of Breastlink
Medical Group, Inc.

Director of Translational
Medicine at the Barbara K.
Robinson Breast Cancer
Research Program

Dr James Waisman is one of the pre-eminent breast oncologists in the United States. Trained as a medical oncologist, he began to sub-specialize in breast cancer in the mid-1980s at the Van Nuys Breast Center in Los Angeles. He and his colleague Melvin Silverstein, MD did some of the pioneering work on the management of ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS). He has authored or co-authored 40 peer-reviewed articles, 60 abstracts and 12 books or book chapters.

He has also been a presenter at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Over the past several years, Dr. Waisman has lectured at community forums sharing the newest breast cancer breakthroughs reported at this symposium. He is accompanied by advocates who attended the symposium with him.

In 1998 he left the Van Nuys Breast Center, which was one of the paramount private breast centers in the United States, to go to the University of Southern California, where he became head of translational research for breast cancer at the USC Norris Cancer Center. In 2002 he joined Breastlink Medical Group, Inc and currently is the Vice President of Breastlink Medical Group, Inc. and Director of Translational Medicine at the Barbara K. Robinson Breast Cancer Research Program. He directs the collaboration with the University of Washington Vaccine Program.

James Waisman, MD is known for his compassion and his commitment to patient care, treating each woman as an individual. He is beloved by his patients and their families. Dr. Waisman is also a superb teacher. The recipients of his teaching are principally his patients but also his medical students and his fellow staff and physicians.